Coventry Heirloom - 1958 Jaguar XK150

A son remembers his father in his 1958 Jaguar XK150

from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

The story is amazingly simple: Man buys car; later, man gives car to son. And that's the whole thing: Two men, one car, over 53 years. In between, though, is a literal lifetime of memories.
We didn't go looking for John J. "Jay" Kearns Jr., nor did he go looking for us. We were just out for a drive with friends from Vermont's RPM sports car shop, and Jay showed up at lunch. His wasn't the only XK with the group rallying that day, and we didn't have the opportunity to look at the car until later.
That it's unrestored is immediately obvious. The paint is surprisingly intact, but almost every edge has been chipped, worn and sandblasted by airborne dirt until the body, dull in shadow, becomes velvety in strong light. Inside, the age is immediately apparent. The first thing you see is damage: The driver's seat bottom is held together with thick lashings of black tape, while the back is worn through in spots. As this is the ultra luxurious XK150, the interior has a remarkable amount of leather--not only the seats, but also the full dash, A-pillars, door panels and even multiple inserts in the footwells and transmission tunnel are cowhide. "I can't say I like it as much as an XK120 or 140 dashboard, but it was the 'in' thing," said Jay. The rest is wool carpet. One of the leather pieces is a mat for the driver's foot, and years of heels have dug a hole in it, while rings, fingers and bright sun have given parts of the steering wheel the texture of driftwood. While they weren't necessarily known for the quality of the leather they used, Jaguar for at least one car must have used the finest in the world, for where it hasn't been subject to the action of hand and weather, it's beautiful.
For beauty, however, nothing compares to the unraveled welting on the A-pillar. It's where Jay's dad's hand rested, over the years, as he drove.
John Joseph "Jack" Kearns Sr. was living in Albany, New York, in 1958, but when his high school-aged son Jay was ready for his first car, they were visiting family in New Jersey. There, they drove to an old friend in Ridgewood, where Jack had grown up with the owner of McGuire Motors. A German-born salesman took Jay out for a test drive in a heavily used VW Bug ("He must have been a rally driver," said Jay), while Dad loitered on the showroom floor.
Jack was a car lover, but didn't have a sports car at the time, after he got tired of melting brake shoes in his Austin-Healey 100. "Actually, I think I wrecked it," said Jay. "I didn't get to drive it much, but I managed to damage it." In college, Jack had a job delivering cars from Detroit to the East Coast, mostly Cadillacs, and Jay thinks he raced a little before the war. "He could name all the extinct marques," said Jay. So he knew what he was looking at as he waited in enforced proximity to the new Jaguar XK150 Open Two Seater on the showroom floor, and by the time Jay came back from his test drive, McGuire Motors was selling two cars to the Kearns boys. They drove them home to Albany together.
"He drove it very vigorously for a long time," said Jay, himself familiar with vigor--the Bug met its end on the track at Lime Rock: "It was kind of after the races," he said sheepishly. That didn't stop trips to the races, and he says his favorite memories are of heading to the track there or in Watkins Glen with Jack in the Jaguar. In that era, New York State's Portland cement Thruway interstate was only partially completed, and the unopened sections were popular with the fast crowd. Jay reports that they got the XK150 up to an indicated 135 MPH, which is just about what the factory claimed. "A good test, at least for straight shots," he said. "We both really liked to drive," he said. "He was a terrific driver, and he taught me things about driving that people don't even discuss today, unless it's in a racing atmosphere."
It was always a summer fun car, and received care from the time it was new by Albany's Gordon Newport, an independent Jaguar mechanic. "It was a nice car, it looked good, and it made him look good," said Gordon. "He really appreciated it." Gordon confirmed Jay's memory that the engine has never come out, and he'd only ever had to do work such as head gaskets, rings and valves. He did remember putting an Abarth exhaust on it. "It was a good experience for everyone," he said. "Although I had a love/hate relationship with it--there was no Jaguar 101 in the classroom," and when he sent a mechanic to a factory-sponsored Jaguar school in New Jersey, "they talked racing for five days."
In time, Jack used the car less, and in the late Seventies, took it off the road, although it still saw use every now and then. In the early Nineties, he gave it to Jay. "I might have run it for one year, but it was just a little too exotic for my financial capabilities," he said. He stored it for most of another seven or eight years, and "If it would start, I'd use it." After Gordon retired, Jay took it to a large vintage Jaguar shop for work, but the car seemed unwilling to behave for another's hands, and he came away frustrated.
In the end, there probably weren't more than four years of the car running between 1980 and the time he brought it to Vermont, about five years ago. Once again, it coughed into life, sporadically, then retreated into hibernation for several years, until 2010, when he brought it to RPM. Now, the accumulated result of decades of disuse could be remedied. Extensive work was needed to the ignition and other wiring to get the car running reliably, and they found the ignition advance curve was causing it to diesel badly. Tuning and synchronizing the twin carburetors helped with the running, once Jay put in fresh gas and some miles to burn the carbon out of the head. The braking system had to be completely overhauled, including new lines and a rebuilt master cylinder. New wheel bearings went in the front, and it was a struggle to get out the rear hubs to cure leaking axle seals.
"It's running beautifully," said Jay, and as we can attest from following him for many miles, it does burn some oil. "The engine's wet," he said. "Someone who was really, truly in love with these vehicles would strip it down to bare metal," but that isn't currently a possibility. "Restoration is just a question of money, and I've never had a lot of that. So I've just eked it along, and it's pretty damn good."
In fact, Jay's decades of intimate experience and expert instruction allow him to drive casually at the limit. In fast company, it was hard to keep up with him, and sometimes only the whiff of smoke, or the unique rasp of the straight-six told us we were on the right track. We're not saying we saw daylight under his inside tire in hard cornering, but we wouldn't swear in court that we didn't. It keeps you young, driving like that. "It takes a lot more physical effort than cars do today," he said. "It's a handful--that's part of the fun."
"[RPM's] Steve has a guy who would like to have it, but it's hard for me to think about selling it. I don't know if my kids would let me!" A better option, then, is to wait for one of his children to obtain the resources for restoration, and Jay thinks that's the most likely possibility. As Gordon Newport said, "If a Jaguar is taken care of properly, it will last for a darn long time, longer than it was ever intended." Fifty-three years and counting, still running hard, is longer than anyone intended, or probably could have imagined. When this car was built, it was 63 years since Lanchester started England's car industry, and there couldn't have been more than a dozen cars that old in the country. It would have been inconceivable to think that a roadster like this would survive, not just into the 21st century, but seemingly indefinitely beyond. "It's a matter of how fast I deteriorate," said Jay. "Which makes it longer, the car or me?" No offense, Jay, but we're laying our bets on the Jaguar.

This article originally appeared in the November, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.